How can school leaders and teachers design and conduct home visits, particularly when teachers might have more than 100 students on their rosters? How can schools connect home visits with college, career, and life planning? How can home visits spark stronger and more supportive partnerships between parents and teachers? And do teenagers even want their teachers to come to their homes? Based in Boston, 1647 is a nonprofit organization that helps school systems and educators design and implement effective home-visit programs using the core principles of the Relationship-Building Home Visit Model developed by the Parent-Teacher Home Visit Project. An abundance of research studies have shown that a family’s involvement in their child’s education can accelerate educational progress and achievement, and home visits provide unique opportunities for teachers and families to build meaningful relationships and shared goals for supporting a child’s school success.

In this workshop, participants will learn evidence-based home-visit strategies from coaches, teachers, and parents who will share their experiences with successful home visits and family engagement in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Participants will hear stories, receive data, and learn nuts-and-bolts techniques for implementing high-impact home visits at middle school and high school levels.

The way educators assess can drive the way they teach. Moving toward proficiency-based assessment means changing the way students’ work is scored, how teachers give students feedback, and what students are expected to do with that feedback once it’s received. In mathematics classes, this means changing the way teachers design and score more traditional assessments, such as tests and quizzes. It also means incorporating new and different assessments to give students to demonstrate their proficiency.

In this session, participants will see sample assessments, rubrics, and student work samples from mathematics classes in a school that uses portfolio-based promotion. They will analyze two tests—one traditional assessment and one more authentic, open-ended performance task. Participants will explore a continuum of assessment options to determine which assessment type is the right tool for the job, and examine model rubrics for use with tests and open-ended performance tasks.

Presenters will discuss ways to incorporate meaningful revision into mathematics learning, helping students to use feedback from their assessments as opportunities for rethinking, new learning, and re-assessment. Participants will leave with a better understanding of how to set clear criteria for proficiency in mathematics.

For many students, math has been understood and taught as a subject of “correct answers”, but math is really a subject of patterns and creativity. In this workshop, participants explore the power of open-ended problems in mathematics: those with multiple entry and exit points and more than one solution. Presenters will encourage an understanding of how problems empower student exploration, creativity, and involvement in the work.

Participants will look at the traditional closed-ended problems posed in math class and rewrite them to allow for more freedom, flexibility, and creativity in the work that students create, allowing for multiple entry and exit points.

This interactive session will focus on the creation and use of high-quality learning targets to facilitate student agency and rigorous instruction in a competency-based learning environment. Participants will deconstruct social studies and science performance indicators to identify key vocabulary and concepts, consider the depth of knowledge needed for instruction and assessment, and pinpoint what a student must know and be able to do to demonstrate mastery. They will then have the opportunity to create their own student-friendly learning targets.

Participants will leave with K-12 sample learning targets for social studies and science, as well as the skills and resources needed to duplicate the process in their own school or system.

How do school-family partnerships work and why do they matter? What are the most effective ways that schools, families, and local organizations can work together to support the success of all children and youth in a community? And how can schools get historically disengaged and marginalized groups to the table and ensure that their voices are both heard and honored? At Lawrence CommunityWorks, a nonprofit community-development corporation based in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a team of community organizers has been working closely with the administrators, educators, students, and families of Lawrence Public Schools for the past three years on a variety of engagement activities, including two primary strategies: Community Education Circles, a series of relationship-building events and conversations between teachers and families, and The Marketplace, a regularly held school-wide networking night designed to build trust and mutual support between families and school staff.

In this workshop, participants will learn about effective community-organizing strategies, school structures that tend to facilitate or impede authentic school-family partnerships, and several practical dialogue and networking techniques that will work in any school system or community. The presenters will also model a capacity-building training activity and provide participants with a practical, step-by-step toolkit of best practices developed for educators, students, and families. 

To ensure that students meet cross-curricular standards, we must provide them with opportunities to develop the necessary 21st century skills. If we don’t provide meaningful ways for students to demonstrate proficiency in those skills or design truly meaningful ways to assess them, we run the risk of paying lip service to those standards.

In this session, participants will learn how project-based learning can help students experience deeper learning (i.e., master core academic content, think critically, work collaboratively, communicate effectively, and develop self-direction). Presenters will share the project-based learning approach developed and implemented by the New Tech Network in their 200+ schools across the country, and will discuss how the integration of project-based learning and proficiency-based learning can accelerate a school’s implementation of Global Best Practices. Finally, presenters will discuss how the New Tech Network’s technology can be used to assess and verify cross-curricular Standards.

Every school that is committed to educational equity needs to put in place systems and practices that ensure positive outcomes for ALL students, including those who are historically underserved. At Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the entire school community—administrators, teachers, and staff—believes that equity, high expectations, and a positive culture of support and encouragement built on systems-wide restorative practice drive educational success and aspirations. It’s one of the reasons that 95% of school’s students, including a significant of first-generation youth, choose to attend college after graduation.

In this workshop, participants will learn how to use restorative practices and three-tiered interventions to build a positive school culture and educational community through active learning, including a role-playing activity based on restorative circles. In addition, participants will explore the four frames of the restorative window using behavioral vignettes to develop a shared understanding of the context, rationale for, and impact of restorative practices in schools. Presenters will also share practical insights about the essential structures and systems that school leaders and educators can use to initiate restorative practices at their own school.  

While our national dialogue on public education in the United States has long been focused on achievement gaps, educational leaders are beginning to pay more attention to opportunity gaps—or the lack of access to resources and opportunities that create further disparities across race, socioeconomic status, English proficiency, and other factors. This more systemic view puts the responsibility on our institutions rather than on our students and families. Partnerships that bridge in-school and out-of-school time become a key strategy to create more access and opportunity for students in the gap. Funding, creating, and implementing community-school partnerships while using practices that promote equity, authentic engagement, and relationship-building takes time, patience, a commitment to continuous improvement, and the ability to persist through essential (but often difficult) conversations. The Puget Sound Educational Service District, one of nine regional educational agencies serving school districts in Washington State, has made a commitment to becoming an anti-racist multicultural organization—a critical lens when doing authentic engagement and partnership work.

In this workshop, participants will explore promising practices and lessons learned through authentic community-school partnerships in Washington State, including strategies for overcoming common institutional practices that can perpetuate inequities in family and community engagement. The presenters will focus on projects, funded through a regional Race to the Top Grant, designed to improve outcomes for students by integrating student and family engagement strategies and by extending learning time beyond the school day.

In this session, presenters will outline a framework for planning and assessing units of study that engages students in the dynamic integration of content with real-world literacies, such as reading, writing, and numeracy.

Participants will learn how to plan an authentic performance task that will provide acceptable evidence of student learning, and will consider how performance-based assessments contribute to a student-centered learning environment, enabling students to explore future roles in a safe rehearsal space while demonstrating proficiency on learning standards.

In Colorado’s Thompson School District, the learning services department gathered feedback from staff around the professional learning experiences that were being offered. After reviewing the feedback, the department developed a Personalized Professional Learning Pathway model, which provided 29 pathways teachers could access for their professional learning. The pathways shifted professional learning from one-size-fits-all to experiences that were based on the personal passions of teachers, allowing for continued growth and the opportunity to implement the new learning in daily classroom practice.

Presenters will explain how the personalized pathway model for teachers and school administrators was created, implemented, and revised over the course of two years. They will share their modified Ed Camp model, which includes social, emotional, and academic pathway offerings. They will highlight important components of the pathways program, including the expectations for facilitators and teachers.

Participants will learn how to create a plan to engage and empower teachers to design their own professional learning experiences that provide personalized growth opportunities and support teacher leadership.